All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (29 page)

According to 2012 findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, single people spend more than 2 trillion dollars annually.
³³
USA Today
reported the same year that, by 2014, women would be influencing the purchase of $15 trillion in goods.
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And NBC Universal Integrated Media's 2012 “The Curve Report,” claims that single, childless, non-cohabiting women over the age of twenty-seven are spending more per capita than any other category of women on dining out, rent or mortgage, furnishings, recreation, entertainment, and apparel: $50 billion a year on food, $22 billion on entertainment, and $18 billion on cars.
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It's a worldwide phenomenon. In 2013, on November 11, a day that the Chinese have turned into an unofficial holiday acknowledging unmarried people, celebration quickly translated to purchasing power. Online sales at China's biggest online retail site, Alibaba, surpassed the United States' 2012 cyber-Monday tally, hitting $5.75 billion dollars by the end of the day. And, while it's impossible to know how many of the unmarried shoppers were women, Alibaba reported that in the first half of the day, shoppers purchased almost 2 million brassieres.

In 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for mortgage lenders to discriminate against potential borrowers based on either
gender or marital status. By the early eighties, single women comprised about ten percent of home buyers. Recently, that percentage nearly doubled, hitting a high of 22 percent in 2006, before the economy tanked, and it receded to about 16 percent in 2014.
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Meanwhile, unmarried male home-buying has stayed steady, representing about eight percent of the market in 2014.
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It is more common for an unmarried woman to purchase her own house than it is for an unmarried man. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of a single female homebuyer in 2010 was forty-one, and her median income $50,000.

The results of single women wielding an unprecedented amount of financial power are multilayered. There is an impact on future marriages, in which women who have become self-supporting earners will be less likely to give up salaries; spouses, with increasing frequency, elect to keep their finances separate.
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There is also an impact on advertisers, who gear messages and products to unmarried women based on the assumption that unmarried women, unlike their married counterparts, do not have anyone else to spend money on, and will thus make purchases for themselves.

There is one particularly ironic wrinkle in the relationship between marriage delay and wealth accrual.

Elliott, the novelist in Washington, attended eight weddings the year she turned thirty-one. She spent money on travel, gifts, bridesmaid's dresses, showers, and bachelorette parties. “All my disposable income was going toward other people's weddings,” she said. “I remember saying to my friends, ‘You guys can all just buy my book when it comes out.' ” At forty, she said, her money is going to baby showers.

As women's earnings have increased and marriage has been postponed, the wedding industry has transformed nuptial celebrations into yet another luxury good that women buy for themselves. Reliant in part on late-marrying, economically established couples with disposable income, the so-called marriage industrial complex has ballooned to dimensions that might be comical were they not also so wasteful. The average wedding costs nearly $30,000. And that's just for the spouses and their families. The bane of existence for many single women is the cash they lay out for their friends' weddings.

As writer Dodai Stewart told me, “There are resentments that crop
up between friends who have been independent together, about the kinds of celebrations that happen around marriage ceremonies and not around single life.” Dodai recalled an instance in which she lost her patience with a friend, after having made a bachelorette trip and gone to the wedding. “I was just done,” she said. “Not with our friendship, just with showering her with presents. I'd much rather be spending money on myself. If these women are living in a dual income household, why am I buying them a present? What about single girl-showers?”

In fact, single-girl parties are not unheard of. Some high-earning unmarried women are reclaiming their fortieth birthdays—the event that is supposed to signal the symbolic ticking out of the biological clock, the turning point at which we're told that our youthful appeal begins to ebb, the storied entrance not into adulthood but into middle age—as celebrations of the lives they have lived and the future in front of them. That is, at least in part, what we celebrate at weddings.

Kate Bolick, author of the 2015 book,
Spinster
, threw a lavish joint fortieth birthday party with a (married) best friend, an event she and her friend referred to as their “Platonic Lesbian Birthday Wedding.” Bolick wrote about the event in
Elle,
acknowledging that “for me, this party actually was a bit like a wedding—it was the first time I'd asked my family and friends to take considerable trouble to gather together on my behalf, not to mention spend their money to get there. . . . Did I get points for sparing them the added expenditures of a bridal shower, bachelorette party, reception dinner, day-after brunch, and a gift, plus the bonus of knowing that, unlike nearly half of the weddings they go to, this celebration wouldn't end in divorce? If there was one thing I could assure my guests, it was that I'd be around until I was dead.”

It's possible to acknowledge the economic leaps of the privileged as breakthroughs, but also crucial not to forget that the possibility of more comfortable vistas for some women has often, historically, come at a cost to others.

In the nineteenth century, industrialization alleviated white, middle-class
women's responsibilities for grueling in-home production of food and textiles, and the Cult of Domesticity worked in tandem with expectations of Republican Motherhood (in which women's obligation was the instilling of civic virtue in offspring and the moral maintenance of husbands) to keep privileged women enclosed in their homes. Instead of community engagement, the emphasis came to be on family cohesion as the crucial moral and patriotic responsibility.
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This enabled the wealthy to spend less time worrying about those less fortunate than they and, in a pattern that has remained steady, to suggest that blame for impoverishment might lie with the impoverished's failure to achieve domestic or familial sanctity.

Meanwhile, the cleanliness of middle-class homes, as well as the time cleared so that wives might spend it raising good citizens and offering moral succor to their husbands, was made possible by the new phalanxes of working women. Without servants to haul clean water and scrub a house, without female factory workers to produce the goods on which the family survived, historian Stephanie Coontz points out, “middle class homemakers would have had scant time to ‘uplift' their homes and minister to the emotional needs of their husbands and children.”
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Similar configurations existed in the midst of the twentieth century, as the postwar benefits that created the circumstances for an expanded white middle class meant the contraction of possibility for poor, working Americans, many of them Americans of color. Tending to home and hearth was held up as the feminine, familial ideal, but the actual scrubbing of the hearth was often done by poorer women, immigrants, and African-Americans who were in no economic position to depart the work force and attend to the cleaning and uplift of their own homes.

And, of course, when the Second Wave arrived to free many middle-class white women from their domestic prisons, many of those women continued to rely further on the low-paid labor of poorer women of color as nannies and housekeepers, rather than striking more equitable domestic bargains with their male partners.

Now, slowly but seriously improving economic circumstances of certain classes of privileged independent women—who earn and spend more freely than ever before—should not eclipse the grave economic realities
faced by millions of other single women: the ones who continue to labor for low wages, making the goods and providing the services for the wealthy. Working-class and poor women are
also
living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

Ada Li was thirty when she moved to the United States from China in 2001, just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, and found that, in their aftermath, especially for immigrants, life was hard: people were scared, suspicious; she sensed there were no jobs for her. She considered returning to China. Her friends in the United States urged her to stay, offering to help find her a husband who could support her.

Ada was not interested in finding a husband, but decided to stick it out and keep looking for work. A family friend hired her to make clothing on a sewing machine on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. After a year, she enrolled in manicure school. In these years, Ada recalled, she was “always busy, not a lot of time to go out or talk with friends. I was not taking English classes because I had no time. Just work.” Ada worked six days a week from seven in the morning until nine at night, and on her day off, she took her manicure classes, returning to the sewing machine at night if there were still clothes to be made. “Hard life,” she said, remembering how little money she made, how difficult it was for her to pay the rent.

For many women, the pursuit of work and money has far less to do with fulfillment, excitement, or identity than it does with subsistence. And, for many single women, scraping by is as hard as it has ever been. For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be.

Beneath all the statistics about women spilling into colleges and universities
and boardrooms—statistics that are important and unprecedented, and compiled adroitly in such books as Hanna Rosin's
The End of Men
and Liza Mundy's
The Richer Sex
, which both proclaim that women are overtaking men in economic and professional realms—are piles and piles of asterisks. These asterisks reveal that while some women
are
enjoying more educational, professional, sexual, and social freedom than ever before, many more of them are struggling, living in a world marked by inequity, disadvantage, discrimination, and poverty.

It's crucial to unpack what's true and what's not true about female advancement—and
single
female advancement—across classes, rich, poor, and in between. When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.

For centuries, women who did not find economic shelter with husbands often discovered themselves nonetheless reliant on men, such as their fathers, brothers, or brothers-in-law, for support. Jane Austen, who came from comparative comfort, once accepted and then rescinded her acceptance of a marriage proposal, from a suitor to whom she did not wish to yoke herself. She lived her life in her family home, and then in her brother's homes. She wrote famously, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor.”

One “element of continuity in women's work (as in their lives,)” writes historian Nancy Cott, “was its constant orientation toward the needs of others, especially men.” As professional opportunity expanded for women, much of it was in service of male-run households as domestics, or working for male bosses: as secretaries, stenographers, retail clerks. Teaching and nursing, two historically female-dominated professions that did not necessarily entail answering to male superiors, involved the replication of subservient female behaviors, the tending of children and sick people. And none of the professions in which women have managed to thrive, so many of which mimic the
unpaid
labors assigned to women historically, have been known for being well paid.

Certainly, circumstances are improved compared to what they were two-hundred years ago, or fifty years ago (Women can open their own bank accounts! Get their own mortgages! Marital rape is less legal!). But men's economic and professional dominance has not in fact come to an end. In the United States, they are still very much on top. Men are the CEOs and the heads of universities, the scientists, and the acclaimed novelists; they dominate the world's most explosive field, technology; they are the firefighters and cops, the bankers and doctors; they are, for now,
all
the presidents and
all
the vice presidents ever to have been elected; they are 80 percent of Congress.

Men earn, on average, a dollar to women's 78 cents. That gap is far wider for women of color; it has remained mostly unchanged for more than a decade. The history of gendered and racial discrimination is not past; it has accrued, and often meant that money has
not
accrued, to women and especially to women of color. As Kimberlé Crenshaw reported
¹
in 2014, the median wealth, defined as the total value of one's assets minus one's debts, of single black women is $100; for single Latina women it is $120; those figures are compared to $41,500 for single white women. And for married white couples? A startling $167,500.
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Women made up only 4.8 percent of
Fortune's
top CEOs in 2014.
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Only twenty of the nation's thousand largest companies were run by female CEOs in 2012 (that's four percent) and, as
Forbes
reported, that number is a record; eleven of those CEOs were hired between 2011 and 2012.
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Journalism professor Caryl Rivers wrote in 2010, “Nearly all American billionaires are male, or widows of males, with the exception of Oprah Winfrey.”
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